ChurchHatesTucker alerts us to the news that Sony has applied for a patent on an emotion detection device that could, for example, recognize when someone viewing a television or playing a video game is laughing.

As China and India are exhorted to increase intellectual property protection and enforcement to higher standards – “harmonization” in the rhetoric of its proponents – they risk emulating the detrimental IP systems of the developed world. The United States, widely viewed as the most innovative nation in the world, has a patent system that has, according to Jaffe, “become sand rather than lubricant in the wheels of American progress” (Jaffe 2004). Even more worrying, the trend in international intellectual property is actually speeding past the American level of protection, raising concerns that the incredibly strong IP in countries will diminish, rather than promote, innovative capabilities.

OpenDocument Format (ODF) is the only open standard for office applications, and it is completely vendor neutral.

Malaysia and Brazil are among the prominent supporters of ODF (at a national level) and over in Brazil we now find more evidence of this. In addition, IDG News Service reveals that TextEdit has ODF support, which is wonderful news. It has been the case for quite some time, but we’ve just learned that TextEdit will soon support saving as ODF, which is important progress.

The most recent version of TextEdit, included with OS X Leopard, can open and edit files in rich text format (.rtf), Microsoft’s old and new Word formats (.doc and .docx), and the OpenDocument format (.odt) used by OpenOffice.

TextEdit is quite widely used, so it’s another notable win for ODF.

In previous posts about i4i [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11] we mentioned the fact that ODF FUD had arrived from the Burton and Gartner groups, both of which work with Microsoft. Sadly enough, even afterBurton and Gartner were proven wrong, a few people are adding harmful noise via Twitter by linking to Asay’s misinformed post and adding remarks like this: “Of course i4i says ODF doesn’t infringe, they have no money..”

No, it’s because it’s technically not infringing. Such remarks are worth correcting as they only encourage uncertainty and doubt. The real patent danger to ODF is Microsoft, not i4i. See for example:

Microsoft embarrassed by new XML patent email

[...]

“We saw [i4i's products] some time ago, and met its creators,” said Sawicki in the Jan. 23, 2003, e-mail. “Word 11 will make it obsolete. It looks great for XP though.” Word 11 was the in-development code name for what was eventually dubbed Word 2003.

Specifically, Microsoft must refrain from “selling, offering to sell, and/or importing in or into the United States any Infringing and Future Word Products that have the capability of opening a .XML, .DOCX or .DOCM file (containing custom XML),” the injunction states.

Imagine a world without Word

[...]

Microsoft Word, though popular, is not the exclusive word-processing software of the federal government. For example, the Joint Forces Command is using OpenOffice for a small experimental project, said Kathleen Jabs, a spokeswoman at the command.

The i4i case is another massive opportunity for ODF (and ODF-compliant software) to gain dominance. It is good news to open standards, not just to Free software, to which ODF is a prerequisite but not the other way around. █

“Microsoft sees what’s coming. Things like Word and Excel sort of like a drug now getting ready to go generic.”

In addition to all this, we now learn that Yahoo is joining an anti-Google coalition, which involves no-one other than Microsoft. Well, Microsoft was Yahoo’s enemy one year ago when Yahoo was becoming friends with Google, remember? Microsoft used its might inside the government to break apart those two willing partners. And now — one year later — Yahoo! is headed by a former Microsoft ally (Autodesk CEO) and a poisoned board of directors. This changes the story completely. Engadget puts it like this:

Microsoft, its new pet dog Yahoo, and Amazon have decided to join together in the soon to be formed Open Book Alliance.

Microsoft didn’t have to buy Yahoo!, yet in many ways Yahoo! seems like an asset of Microsoft now, just like Citrix, Corel, or Novell.

“To stress how hypocritical Microsoft has been, it too scanned many books before it called the whole thing off.”It ought to be emphasised that Microsoft supported more aggressive actions, including lawsuits, against Google’s book scanning. To stress how hypocritical Microsoft has been, it too scanned many books before it called the whole thing off. It was losing the game to its competition, Google. At the same time, Microsoft used underhanded legal and political tactics to derail Google’s endeavours, so this is merely the latest such attempt. This is not the first time that Microsoft (co-)creates or supports a coalition against Google in books, either directly or by proxy, as proven many times before (it’s not a theory, it is substantiated).

Apple’s abuse of Linux and Palm [1, 2] recently led to a formal complaint from Palm. It is part of an ongoing pattern where Apple uses patents, breakage of interoperability, or total lack of interoperability to stifle adoption of GNU/Linux or Linux-powered devices [1, 2]. What is Apple so afraid of? That people will find out that more affordable products are just as good — if not better — than Apple’s?

Now we come to discover that 2 years ago Apple was quietly attempting to sort of collude with Palm, as some other companies do. Palm declined the offer, which came from no-one other than Steve Jobs himself. Here is a summary from The Inquirer.

Former Palm chief executive Ed Colligan discussed the matter with Jobs in August 2007, as the smartphone war heated up. According to AP, he rejected the proposal, calling it wrong and “likely illegal”.

[...]

Jobs’ comments have come back to haunt him as the US Justice Department is very interested in how tech companies are trying to lock in staff with bizarre employment contracts.

Derick Mains, a spokesman for Palm said the company had not been contacted by the Justice Department yet.

Got to love the “free market”, eh?

The original report came either from AP or from Bloomberg, which wrote:

Former Palm Inc. Chief Executive Officer Ed Colligan rejected a proposal from Apple Inc.’s Steve Jobs to refrain from hiring each other’s employees two years ago, calling it wrong and “likely illegal,” according to their communications.

Two years ago, Apple chief exec Steve Jobs suggested to Palm’s then-CEO Ed Colligan that the two companies agree not to hire each other’s employees. Colligan reportedly refused, saying such a deal would be “likely illegal”.

The Linux version of Synology Assistant is designed for Ubuntu distribution. In addition to the existing Windows and Mac version, users can now install Synology Assistant on Linux environment. “The Linux version completes our commitment in providing convenience of Disk Station setup on different platforms,” said Edward Lin, marketing director of Synology.

Performing data backup and recovery in a Linux environment poses some unique challenges. Brien Posey, a freelance writer and former CIO, answers some of the most common questions about Linux data backup in this Q&A. His answers are also available as an MP3 below.

And therein lies the biggest strength of Linux. It’s flexibility means that it can be almost anything to almost anyone in need of a good operating system, on almost any piece of hardware. And it’s here to stay.

But perhaps the advantage that came through most strongly was in terms of ‘flexibility’ to run software on whatever physical platform may be wanted. For example, TheBloke mentioned it being possible to employ “Linux as the host OS while allowing me to continue to use the Windows apps I want – Microsoft Office, Toad for Oracle, Photoshop and more. Plus it allows me to use all those USB peripherals I have that don’t work properly under Linux. My mobile phone, for example.” He then made the valid point that “Having lots of RAM is important of course”.

Kernel Space

As of the spring, nVidia had shipped over 100 million CUDA-compatible GPUs, although most of them were probably not in supercomputer clusters. The nVidia Tesla GPU co-processors are supported in both Linux and Windows environments.

The Linux Plumbers Conference today announces the speakers and conference program for the 2nd annual conference to be held September 23-25 in Portland, Oregon immediately following LinuxCon Portland 2009. Both events will be held at the Marriott Downtown Waterfront in Portland, home to one of the largest Linux communities worldwide.

As part of its LSB Infrastructure Project, the Linux Foundation has released a tool for testing the ABI compatibility of different versions of a C or C++ library. The ABI Compliance Checker tests whether data types or parameters passed to functions have changed between two versions of a library. Applications can behave incorrectly or crash where the binary interface is not compatible.

Google

Google has begun work on a 64-bit version of Chrome for Linux, a move likely to whip Linux loyalists into a lather of excitement.

“The V8 team did some amazing work this quarter building a working 64-bit port. After a handful of changes on the Chromium side, I’ve had Chromium Linux building on 64-bit for the last few weeks,” said Chrome engineer Dean McNamee in a mailing list message Thursday.

Google engineers have been beavering away at a 64-bit version of the company’s Chrome browser for the Linux platform.

According to Chrome developer Dean McNamee, Mountain View’s V8 team has been tinkering with a Chromium Linux 64-bit for several weeks now. V8, in case you were wondering, is the web kingpin’s JavaScript engine.

Desktop Environments

KDE 4.3 is a great desktop, but there are improvements I think should be made to make it perfect. I have high hopes for KDE 4.4 and I’m hoping some of these ideas will be considered for the next release, which will probably be due in January. I’ll definitely make sure to submit them to the KDE team for consideration, as you should too if you have any suggestions. With all that out of the way, let’s get started.

Red Hat Family

For me as the operator and head of the StartCom Certification Authority, every computer application making use of SSL and cryptography is of importance, specially those of the various platforms from the house of Microsoft. That’s one of the reasons why I’m today extremely pleased to announce the upcoming default support of the StartCom Authority by Microsoft. Starting approximately the 22nd of September, Microsoft intends to distribute a non-security update package to the Windows operating systems which includes the trusted StartCom root certificate and the automatic root certificate update service will update the cryptographic certificates root store on those systems whenever a StartCom issued certificate is encountered.

This not only means that Internet Explorer will finally support web sites secured with StartCom issued certificates by default, the implications for SSL security and the Internet at large are potentially reaching further than that:

StartCom is the only public certification authority providing digital certificates for free!

The open source revolution may have yet to happen, but with company budgets on the line, change is in the air.

[...]

Thus far, Red Hat has been focusing that help on the infrastructure side of corporate IT, so the kind of behind-the-scenes software on top of which applications run. It has branched out from its core Linux OS into all kinds of infrastructure software that enable things like clustering and virtualization.

Debian Family

Recently I wrote about installing Ubuntu Linux on my MSI Wind netbook. Now that my netbook is happily running Ubuntu, my MacBook Pro is feeling deprived and slighted. It is time to do something about that.

Phones

Those developing applications for the Linux-based Pre smartphone can now submit them to be considered for inclusion in an upcoming “Palm App Catalog” beta. The test version of Palm’s online store will open in mid-September, the company said in a blog posting yesterday.

Sub-notebooks

It seems that every vendor is getting on the netbook bandwagon-and if they’re not, they’re trying to get their own bandwagon rolling with a raft of similar form factor devices. Consumers love netbooks as a cheap, internet-enabled PC substitute and carriers seem happy to subsidise them in order to drive mobile broadband subscriptions.
[...]

Linux will be the glue that holds the joint effort together

Both companies have their own in-house Linux projects-Intel with Moblin and Nokia with Maemo-and will align their respective strategies around a number of key open source technologies such as oFono, ConnMan, Mozilla, X.Org, BlueZ, D-BUS, Tracker, GStreamer, and PulseAudio. Incidentally, Intel recently acquired mobile and embedded devices software firm Wind River for $884m and said it would licence Nokia’s HSPA 3G modem technologies to complement its own mobility platforms.

Google’s Linux-based Android mobile operating system has been fingered for powering mobile devices beyond the smartphone for some time now. On Sept. 15, Archos Technology will unveil just such a device, a tablet computer.

At the Sept. 15 press conference, the company will showcase the touchscreen device, it said this week. The tablet will have a 5-inch display, with 720p video support, an HDMI output and native OpenGL libraries, all with a Texas Instruments processor.

For Chris Lundberg, open source is as much a philosophy as it is a method of software development. Open source and open access represent the idea that solutions are often better found via many, than via few, he says. Those are some of the ideas he takes to the table as a member of Open Source for America’s advisory board.

fluid Operations today announced a breakthrough in the use of storage-assisted virtualization to drive IT efficiencies. After the initial publishing of the VMFS technology in March 2009 and making it available with an open-source license, the market started to anticipate new private cloud management features that would become possible.

Computers get faster and smaller every year, but in the case of servers – the building blocks for many modern businesses – the tasks we expect them to perform have increased to match. We so rely on these servers that we increasingly need to monitor what they do, how they do it and when they hit problems.

Pentaho Corporation, the commercial open source alternative for business intelligence (BI), today announced the opening of its newest office in San Francisco. The expansion is in response to growing demand for Pentaho offerings, and represents the latest in a series of 2009 achievements and milestones.

Many of us are consuming video and audio content as part of our working lives; some of us are broadcasting it and encoding it, too. For both types of tasks, one of the best applications that you can get is the free, open-source VLC Media Player. It recently came out in a significantly updated version 1.0, and is now out in a stable version 1.0.1. I’ve been using the new version, and highly recommend it, whether you’re running Windows, Mac OS X or Linux.

OSSEC is an open source HIDS that merges log analysis, file integrity monitoring, rootkit detection and active responses. It started as a side-project to help me solve some problems that I had on a previous job (6-7 years ago). They had the need to do integrity checking on multiple systems (Linux, Solaris AIX, etc) and Tripwire just didn’t scale for us. We were forced to make it scale, and started using it because was the only solution available at the time, but it was a pain to manage individually on 100+ servers.

Programming

Eminent Java developers Richard Hall, BJ Hargrave and Peter Kriens have formulated a new proposal for a simple module system for Java, which could be developed as part of Java Specification Request (JSR) 294 ‘Improved Modularity Support in the Java Programming Language’. The authors hope their proposal will bring the different ideas on modularisation into some sort of harmony.

The Qt-Python bindings might not be 100% stable, say the PySide project developers, but it’s in a usable shape — “especially if you can tolerate an occasional rough edge and unpainted surface,” as they put it in their announcement. Along with the Qt bindings, PySide provides automated binding generation tools. It thus not only targets Qt developers in the narrow sense, but is also applicable for other Qt-based or more general C++ bindings.The Qt-Python bindings might not be 100% stable, say the PySide project developers, but it’s in a usable shape — “especially if you can tolerate an occasional rough edge and unpainted surface,” as they put it in their announcement. Along with the Qt bindings, PySide provides automated binding generation tools. It thus not only targets Qt developers in the narrow sense, but is also applicable for other Qt-based or more general C++ bindings.

Contents

Personally, since I bought my own USB turntable, I’ve been enjoying albums that I haven’t listened to in years because they were in storage. Not only that, but, despite the fact that the cult of vinyl seems likely to be around for a few more years, I can’t help being relieved that I’ve transferred my old music to a more accessible format while I still can.

The other release worth checking out is the updated version of Open Discovery, a USB turnkey bioinformatics Linux distribution with a customized MPI specifically designed for multi-core processors. Open Discovery 2 ships with an MPI compiled GROMACS V-3 3, the molecular dynamics software application. You can download Open Discovery 2 here.

Desktop

For this series of articles we set out to build a high powered workstation with the latest Linux virtualization software capable of running multiple operating systems (OS) at the same time. Our goal was to get the fastest multiple-core processor and most memory while staying close to the $500 price tag of the other off-the-shelf machines. We also wanted the ability to install at least three hard drives to help with performance issues when running multiple OSes from the same disk.

This was the message that FOSSFA brought to OSCON. Open source is not only about technology. It is about the people who use the technology to solve day-to-day problems. Being an advocacy and a support group, FOSSFA emphasizes the opportunities that open source offers to Africa in reaching its development goals in all socio-economic areas.

Interview

I know for a fact that there are many other interesting women working and playing in open source, and plenty of them I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting yet. Last week I met Kelaine Vargas at OpenSourceWorld and she sat down and answered my questions in person. I enjoyed that meeting so much that I’ve decided to continue my efforts to find out what women in open source are doing and why they do it. And if I can’t meet you in person, I’ll try to track you down online.

In this interview we talk with Stephen of Songbird. In specific, we talk about:

* How Songbird fits into the Mozilla pantheon
* Aligning user interests with those of content providers
* How Songbird fits into the larger world of open source media players
* Songbird’s business and revenue model in the near term and beyond
* Usability and expandability as strategic precepts
* Apple as an inspirational model

One metric is to refer to the popular Linux-tracking website Distrowatch which logs interest in the various distributions. There are certain limitations to using Distrowatch to pinpoint the best Linux distribution because it only tracks user interest in each distribution which can be affected by ongoing news, frequency of releases and many other intangibles. But as a list of the ten most popular distributions it is a useful guide.

As you might imagine, Austrumi Linux is not geared toward competing with Ubuntu, Fedora or any of the larger desktop distributions. Rather it’s all about portability and the ability to maximize utility while minimizing the actual size of the distribution.

The documentation is extremely good, is updated often and covers everything from basic installation and configuration to getting X up and running and installing and configuring most the popular DE/WM.
The Arch Linux repos have recently received the new KDE 4.3 packages which allows includes many, many great features, however the one the more interesting ones is that now you can download specific packages from KDE without needing the entire desktop environment, again giving you more level of control over things. I will definitely give KDE a try when I get back home (I am a GNOME user at the moment) especially since the have upgrade kwin, the X Windows manager in KDE, to include Compiz-like effects.

So it looks like we are going to have CentOS 4.8 before RHEL 5.4 after all. I blogged about the big 4.8 release delays a week ago and we can expect CentOS 4.8 on Friday if all goes well. Maybe the weekend ?

Debian Family

Karmic won’t bring any revolutionary changes to the default desktop software stack, but there have been some useful overhauls of individual components. Provided the backend of the system is also solid (note to Ubuntu developers: I’d love to have an ath5k wireless driver that finally works without a fuss), Ubuntu 9.10 looks to be a promising release.

In the first of a series on what new software users can expect to find in Karmic Koala come October, we take a peek at the ‘Gnome Control Centre’. Akin to the Windows Control Panel, it will better help users make all-important changes when/if needed…

Appearance

Time for a collection of screenshots, as an illustration of Qt applications on OpenSolaris, both on a local display driven by a Radeon X1200 and on a Sun Ray thin client. Not from KDE applications (although we have KDE 4.3.0 packages for OpenSolaris now) but from qtconfig — possibly the first Qt app you will want to run in OpenSolaris to set up some of the fonts correctly. Before running this version of qtconfig, I removed ~/.config — the whole directory tree — so I would get the default settings. There are screenies of the same 300×100 section of the application on four setups: local display or Sun Ray thin client, and system fontconfig or one built from our own packages. I switched my set of package builds to use the system’s fontconfig a while back, but the specfile for fontconfig (useful if you care about Solaris10) is still there. Both are version 2.5.0; for freetype system is 2.3.7 and the specfiles build 2.3.6.

The amount of support for Android has been pretty astounding so far, with Motorola, HTC, Samsung, Garmin-Asus and Lenovo all planning or releasing phones with Google’s OS. Some of these manufacturers are using WinMo as well, but it’s not the everyman Windows was for PCs. Perhaps that’s due to 6.5′s lethargic pace of development.

Picok is developed in Switzerland so most of the existing modules, or portlets as they’re known in this app, are aimed at European users. Current portlets include a Swiss weather radar, Pons German-English dictionary, and European rail schedule. However, the project wiki has clear instructions for creating custom portlets on your own.

We’ve covered Dimdim a lot here at OStatic. It’s a full-featured free Web conferencing app that raised $6 million in Series B funding last year and has taken aim at expensive commercial options like Cisco System’s WebEx and Microsoft’s Placeware. Up to 20 people at a time can get together withDimdim’s free version which also includes audio and video sharing, event recording, whiteboards, and private messaging.

[Y]ou can use it to broadcast your own video content, you can use it as a video transcoder for converting video file formats, and you can listen to and manage podcasts with it. VideoLAN, which makes VLC Media Player, reports that version 1.0 has already hit 14 million downloads.

On the other end, seeing Free Software in action has I think given us an appreciation few can match for the potential of fairly egalitarian co-operation. People argue about whether Open Source is Communist or Capitalist or whatever. I think that’s basically a category error in a way. Certainly for most capitalist businesses in practical terms, Free Software lets them save money and get more done better. That’s good for business. But I’d have to say that Free Software does refute the idea that competition is the only way to get anything done, or that self-interest is the only motivator. And we don’t see that only in the software itself.

Government

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is releasing an open-source code named the Open Source Corporate Management System (OSCMIS) as part of its move to support open-source software across the federal government.

Literature

Now, though, there are some signs that Flat World Knowledge’s effort is paying off. Wired reports that more than 40,000 college students at more than 400 colleges will use digital, DRM-free textbooks from the company as the school year starts in a matter of days, and that’s up from 1,000 in 30 colleges in the Spring.

Sponsored by the University of Minnesota, Wireless Generation, and Primary Concepts, the goal of the site is to offer an alternative to many of the expensive tools and textbooks “so that schools and districts can redirect textbook funds to other valuable, highly-impactful components of education. Whether those options include professional development, technology, formative assessment or something else, FreeReading provides an opportunity for districts to rethink the return on their education investment dollars.”

Standards/Consortia

The state of web multimedia on Linux is pitiful. Proprietary codecs, plug-ins and closed standards are helping to keep Linux a second rate citizen. What Linux needs is not another proprietary framework like Moonlight, but more open standards. Can Google help by making YouTube a Theora-fest?

There’s also no real consensus between cable companies on how to proceed. One result? Users not having a central resource for video content:

Bowman suggested that projects like TV Everywhere may not yield a single site that will contain content from dozens of programmers. Instead, the authentication system the industry develops may be used to point pay-TV subscribers to several different sites to view their pay-TV content online.

Apart from determined-sounding utterances from certain notable publishers and new pay walls erected this summer in Harlingen, TX, and Schenectady, NY, the industry has made essentially no progress in figuring out how to effectively monetize the formidable web traffic that represents its strongest asset as print franchises wane.

Summary: Yet another analysis of Microsoft’s relationship with Mono and GNU/Linux

HEISE has just published a piece which insinuates that Mono is “monkey business”. The FSF too addressed the issue about a month ago. “More indication of course that Microsoft has everyone’s best interest at heart,” sarcastically claims Neighborlee, quoting the following text: “…[Microsoft] released an ‘extended’ version of the JVM for Windows, which resulted in the writing of Java apps that would work on Windows but not on other platforms, in Internet Explorer but not in Netscape…”

To quote from Heise:

This stance has been countered to some degree by Microsoft’s Community Promise, but doubts remain as to what is actually covered, and de Icaza concedes as much. “In the next few months,” he wrote, “we will be working towards splitting the jumbo Mono source code that includes ECMA + A lot more into two separate source code distributions. One will be ECMA, the other will contain our implementation of ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Winforms and others.” In theory, the core components of Mono and the Mono development stack for Gnome are covered by the Community Promise. The elements that provide compatibility with Windows are not.

From the beginning Mono has been beset by misunderstandings, misconceptions and political ineptitude, not least by Novell, de Icaza’s employer, which allowed Microsoft to insert patent indemnification into its commercial agreement of 2006, souring its relationship with the free software community and giving Microsoft grounds for suggesting, without substantiation, that GNU/Linux and other free software infringed Microsoft patents – and by Microsoft’s ongoing ambivalence towards free and open source software within its own halls.

The author, Richard Hillesley, has actually been a critic of Mono for quite some time. He apparently did try to tone it down for the H, just as he did in other publications. Other writers were not allowed to even express their real opinions — let alone assessments — about Mono, especially in the press (probably grumpy editors).

This is risky judgment.

Back at the beginning (more towards middle) of the decade, people warned against invasion of Iraq, saying it was misguided and would prove rather fruitless. Major newspapers gave little or no attention to such voices, but knowing what we know today it was a colossal mistake. So, the message to get across here is that to forbid criticism of Mono is to make ourselves a lot more vulnerable. A lot of people did not denounce Novell for its patent deal with Microsoft until the middle of 2007 when Microsoft started using this deal to accuse everything and everyone of ‘stealing’.

Jim Zemlin is quoted in this fluffy new piece which is doing too much to commend Microsoft (it’s from Gavin Clarke after all).

Zemlin, though, thinks Microsoft can and should go further by ending any claim to patents in Windows that may or may not be present in Linux.

“They should take a patent license out with the OIN – put their money where their mouth is to make sure patents don’t get in the way of operating systems, make operating systems a no fly zone when it comes to patents,” Zemlin said. “That sends a clear message Linux is solid, and we validate this collective development model and we want to interoperate.”

You’d think Microsoft would treat Dell with a little more decency, since Dell is either number one or number two in PC and server sales depending on sales results in a particular quarter. But no, Microsoft spokespeople keep slamming Linux and netbooks at every opportunity.

“You’d think Microsoft would treat Dell with a little more decency,” writes Gaskin. He apparently isn’t entirely familiar with Microsoft's previous attacks on GNU/Linux at Dell. That is just how Microsoft operates, which brings us back to the question, “has Microsoft changed?” The answer is no, and thus Mono cannot be trusted. █

“I’d be glad to help tilt lotus into into the death spiral. I could do it Friday afternoon but not Saturday. I could do it pretty much any time the following week.”